The Truth About the Palestinian
Refugees - Part 2

For years Israel and her friends have said that thousands
of Palestinians left their homes in 1947-1949 at the urging of their leaders.
As I noted in Part 1, this was one of the reasons the Palestinians left,
but it remains one contested by the Arabs who maintain that no one ever
told the Palestinians to leave and, to the contrary, the Jews expelled
them. Here is what really happened.

A plethora of evidence exists demonstrating that Palestinians
were encouraged to leave their homes to make way for the invading Arab
armies. The U.S. Consul-General in Haifa, Aubrey Lippincott, wrote on
April 22, 1948, for example, that "local mufti-dominated Arab leaders"
were urging "all Arabs to leave the city, and large numbers did so."

The Economist, a frequent critic of the Zionists,
reported on October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived
in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced
their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that
the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air
by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly
intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection
would be regarded as renegades."

Time's report of the battle for Haifa (May 3,
1948) was similar: "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear,
partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost
city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."

Benny Morris, the historian who documented instances
where Palestinians were expelled, also found that Arab leaders encouraged
their brethren to leave. The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following
the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered
women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave
their homes: "Any opposition to this order...is an obstacle to the
holy war...and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts"
(Middle Eastern Studies, January 1986).

Morris also said that in early May units of the Arab
Legion reportedly ordered the evacuation of all women and children from
the town of Beisan. The Arab Liberation Army was also reported to have
ordered the evacuation of another village south of Haifa. The departure
of the women and children, Morris says, "tended to sap the morale
of the menfolk who were left behind to guard the homes and fields, contributing
ultimately to the final evacuation of villages. Such two-tier evacuation-women
and children first, the men following weeks later-occurred in Qumiya in
the Jezreel Valley, among the Awarna bedouin in Haifa Bay and in various
other places."

Who gave such orders? Leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister
Nuri Said, who declared: "We will smash the country with our guns
and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should
conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has
died down."

The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward
Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: "This wholesale exodus was
due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of
an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of
the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews
were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs
enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country."

In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister
in 1948-49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to
leave:

Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of
the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged
them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave
and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return.

"The refugees were confident their absence would
not last long, and that they would return within a week or two,"
Monsignor George Hakim, a Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told
the Beirut newspaper, Sada al-Janub (August 16, 1948). "Their leaders
had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs'
very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile."

"The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam
Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel
Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade," said Habib Issa
in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951). "He pointed
out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions
the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty,
for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean....Brotherly
advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes
and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states,
lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down."

Even Jordan's King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs,
blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:

The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their
leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that
they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would
instantly and miraculously come to their rescue.

Expulsions of Arabs

The Haganah did employ psychological warfare to encourage
the Arabs to abandon a few villages. Yigal Allon, the commander of the
Palmach (the "shock force of the Haganah"), said in his memoirs
that he had Jews talk to the Arabs in neighboring villages and tell them
a large Jewish force was in Galilee with the intention of burning all
the Arab villages in the Lake Huleh region. The Arabs were told to leave
while they still had time and, according to Allon, they did exactly that.

In probably the most dramatic example, in the Ramle-Lod
area, Israeli troops seeking to protect their flanks and relieve the pressure
on besieged Jerusalem, forced a portion of the Arab population to go to
an area a few miles away that was occupied by the Arab Legion. "The
two towns had served as bases for Arab irregular units, which had frequently
attacked Jewish convoys and nearby settlements, effectively barring the
main road to Jerusalem to Jewish traffic" (Benny Morris, "Operation
Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948," (Middle
East Journal, Winter 1986).

As was clear from the descriptions of what took place
in the cities with the largest Arab populations, these cases were clearly
the exceptions, accounting for only a small fraction of the Palestinian
refugees.

Keep in mind that all but a handful of Palestinians had
the choice of staying in their homes. With rare exceptions, those that
did lost little or nothing. The Palestinians who remained in the territory
that became Israel were accepted as full citizens. Those who stayed in
homes that fell under Jordanian control were also allowed to become citizens
of that country. Some who fled were allowed to return to their homes,
but most became refugees and were confined by Arab governments to refugee
camps, denied citizenship and prevented from being resettled or rehabilitated.